Jobs done? Sorkin’s biopic flops on opening weekend

Steve Jobs may play the orchestra, but there's not much of an audience. Photo: Universal Pictures

Steve Jobs had his toughest two days at the box office this weekend since the real Jobs launched the poor-selling Power Mac G4 Cube.

The long-awaited Aaron Sorkin biopic turned to not be that eagerly-anticipated after all, since it limped to a disappointing $7.3 million on its first weekend of wide release.

For those keeping track at home, that’s far, far below the $22.4 million debut of Sorkin’s previous The Social Network, and only marginally better than the panned 2013 Jobs movie, starring Ashton Kutcher. Yikes!

According to box office projections, the $30 million movie had been expected to make between $15 and $19 million for its first wide weekend. In an earlier limited release in Los Angeles and New York, designed to generate buzz, the movie raked in $130,250 per screen — which impressively gave it the 15th highest per-theatre figure in history.

So what can we learn from this? Well, for starters, that it’s dangerous to extrapolate large-scale trends from small data sets, which should be a word of caution for everything from movie box office to tiny studies about the future of Apple Music.

Given the negative reactions to the movie from the likes of Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and — most recently — Walt Mossberg, it’s entirely possible that a number of Apple fans simply chose to skip the movie for fear that it was a hatchet job… err, Jobs. Then again, coming after a previous failed biopic, multiple documentaries and two major biographies, maybe the world simply didn’t need another telling of the Steve Jobs story.

Although this weekend’s disaster certainly doesn’t rule Steve Jobs out of the Oscar race, I’d say it definitely does a lot to harm it. Academy Awards are rarely handed out to a movie because it’s a smash hit, but a huge box office failure also damages its chances.

Did you watch the Steve Jobs movie this weekend? If you did/didn’t what were your thoughts, or reasons behind your decision? Leave them below.